Sunday, November 1, 2009

My Mental Image of the Technological Landscape for the next 10 Years

It is always interesting to look at how the past and present innovations affect the way people interact with each other. For example, Email, ICQ, Blogs and MSN are the past innovation that has successfully demonstrated the possibility of establishing communication channels between the individuals inside the virtual world defined by the Internet. The present innovations like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking go one step further by shedding lights on the possibility that people can actually socialize/interact in the virtual world using their virtual identity. Despite the fact that the past and present innovations are useful tools to keep up-to-date with friends and family, they are far from being perfect. For instance, the virtual identity of each individual is quite monotone in a sense that the available information of each individual is limited by the options defined by the application developers. Additionally, the virtual world created by those applications is always lagging behind the real world. The information on those applications are usually outdated and it does not necessarily represent the actual intention of a particular individual. In summary, the information provided on those applications can be used to spot predefined macro trends but it cannot be used to predict micro trends (i.e. the changing lifestyle of each individual). Being able to predict the micro trends is very valuable since it gives accurate information about each individual so that their concerns and needs can be identified and addressed collectively as soon as possible. In my opinion, this could only happens if the real world and virtual world converge into a single world.

Although the real world and the virtual world will not or never converge, a step to this direction will certainly makes life more interesting (IMHO). I believe that some emerging technologies will be the cornerstone for the development in this direction. They will define the landscape about how information can be collected, shared and stored efficiently in near real-time. I can foresee that the landscape could be composed of three elements namely theUnified Computing Hardware Infrastructure, the New Generation OS Platform Services that run on top the infrastructure and the New Generation Applications that make use of the services to deliver a new set of interactions between human and computer.

You might already recognize that there is actually no new element from what you already know about computers. You are absolutely right because this is not about revolution, it is about how to make use of the things we already know in a more efficient and creative ways . The most important ideas to capture are that 1) the responsibility of computing is centralized in several areas, 2) there are a few popular applications that are so important that OS vendors will build them into their OS platform directly instead of treating them as a set of running applications, 3) a new and interesting set of applications will be emerged due to the changes in the OS platform. In the next few posts, I will describe each element in details. Hope you enjoy it as well!

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